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'UPFRONT with Mike Gousha' focuses on school voucher expansion

-- Jim Bender, president of School Choice Wisconsin, predicted parental demand for the school choice program will eventually prompt lawmakers to lift the caps placed on the program statewide.

“Parents want the ability to find a solution for their children,” Bender told Sunday’s “UPFRONT with Mike Gousha,'' produced in conjunction with WisPolitics.com.

The budget the governor signed last month limits expansion outside of Milwaukee and Racine to 500 students in the first year of the budget and 1,000 in the second.

Bender called the caps arbitrary and predicted demand will exceed the number of spots available.

School voucher expansion set to begin

He said private schools looking to participate in the program have to contact the Department of Public Instruction to qualify. Once deemed eligible, they can accept applications in early August and then the 25 with the most applications will get to participate in the first year.

Those 25 schools will get 10 spots each with the rest assigned per school using a random lottery.

He predicted those 25 schools will end up with 15 to 30 students, while noting the various other factors that will have to be considered as slots as divvied up. That includes a provision in the law that no public school can lose more than 1 percent of its students to the program.

“There’s just no way to think this is going to happen without some serious hiccups,” he told host Kent Wainscott, who was filling in for Gousha.

On a previous episode, DPI Superintendent Tony Evers predicted the caps would go away and a full-blown second school system would develop costing $2 billion annually.

While Bender agreed the caps will go away, he said 80 percent to 85 percent of all students will remain in public schools. Bender said his organization believes high performing schools are a great option for parents.

“Let’s give them the access to all of them, because that way you’ll have parents finding the best solutions for their kids,” he said.

-- Scott Jansen, head of the Department of Workforce Development’s new Office of Skills Development, was also on the show to discuss the state’s efforts to bridge the skills gap.

Jansen said the state hopes to have administrative rules in place by the end of September for the new Fast Forward program with the grant process open by early fall. He said the state has already received 20 to 25 inquiries about Fast Forward, which includes $15 million for special worker training grants.

He said the state isn’t looking to necessarily target individual employers, but businesses that have a common need with training that doesn’t exist now through tech colleges or other means.

“What we’re really preaching to people is that we want things to become pilot sources of training programs that are rather new and innovative that can be replicable, scalable and portable,” he said.

Jansen noted Wisconsin’s job force is expected to turn over 1 million jobs in the next decade. Of that, 680,000 of those jobs are now held by those who will retire while the rest are new skills needed for an evolving workforce.

Magazine calls recovery 'joyless'

Jagler said there's a lot to celebrate about the economy, but he believes people are hesitant to celebrate them. He compared it to the impact the Great Depression had on his grandparents’ generation, making them frugal. He said this generation will never take prosperity for granted.

"We’re hesitant to celebrate because we saw how quickly we lost everything,” he said.

-- Wainscott explains why most Wisconsin residents won't see their money from the new state income tax cut until spring of 2014.